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Thursday, November 25, 2010

Twitter Thursday

I've re-written this entry about four times. Perhaps it's my setting (my desk in the library), but the first paragraph keeps coming out like an introduction to an academic paper. So I'm going to skip it entirely and dive right into Twitter Thursday. There's no twitter account set up for the blog yet, but I do have a personal account where I follow a couple of book people. My intention is to feature one twitter account that you should be following.

I am going to start with one of my top favorite authors: @NaliniSingh. I vividly remember how my love affair with her books began. I remembered reading a review of it in Romantic Times (a magazine I found at my first Bookstore & subscribed to three months) and while I wasn't wowed by the description, I added it to my TBR journal. A week or two later, I got an excerpt of Slave to Sensation via Ms. Singh's publicist in the mail. Since I recognized the title, I read it right away. Then I proceeded to write a gushing email to the publicist and haunted the stockroom until the book came in.

Ever since then, I was hooked. I was fortunate enough to receive ARCs for Visions of Heat and Caressed by Ice. I wrote up a review of Visions of Heat that was featured on Bookstore's internal romance newsletter. One of the final lines read: "This is definitely her breakout series and Ms. Singh will soon be one of the romance heavy-hitters." As we know now, Ms. Singh has gone to be a New York Times bestselling author and an auto-buy for paranormal readers.

I was fortunate enough to meet Ms. Singh at RomCon2010. She actually is the main reason I went since she is based in New Zealand and rarely comes to the States for signings. We had a few email exchanges prior to this, back in 2006 & 2007, and not much contact since then until I begged (like full on groveling) for an ARC of Bonds of Justice. I expected to be one of the crowd, but she knew who I was. She remembered my reviews. I was speechless. She is incredibly nice and very warm towards her fans (I was by no means the only fangirl there).

Her Twitter account is worth following for the following reasons:

She rarely tweets unless it's book-related so your feed will not be cluttered with extraneous information. Ms. Singh has a blog of her own where she talks about her work in general and occasionally shares tidbits from her personal life. She is also a weekly poster at The Odd Shots, where she will sometimes make book recommendations or post some of her photographs (which are gorgeous).

When they release an excerpt or cover blurb, Ms. Singh tweets a link, thereby circumventing the need to continually check her website and allowing for instant gratification. She also sends out reminders about publication dates.

Ms. Singh checks her feed on a daily basis. She may answer fan questions or send out smiley faces. I skimmed her feed while writing this entry and now I know that Max's brother, River, will be a presence in Kiss of Snow.

So, when you're finished with your turkey dinners (Happy Thanksgiving, fellow Americans!), log into Twitter and follow @NaliniSingh. I personally will probably be in bed, hiding under the covers, because tomorrow is Black Friday. It's bad enough working Black Friday, but considering Hanukkah will only be a week away? I'd rather be home reading!